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Notes
1. My ability to write this has depended heavily on and profited greatly from, first, chapter-by-chapter discussions with Mark Okrent, followed, second, by discussion with a reading group organized by Jeremy Wanderer, consisting of Yael Gazit, Steven Levine, Ronald Loeffler, Elisa Magri, Mark Okrent, Joseph Rouse, Carl Sachs, Sally Sedgwick, Allen Speight, and Preston Stovall. Okrent and Sachs both commented on the first draft of this review, and helped straighten me out on several issues. What fine interlocutors I am lucky to have!
2. Perhaps the 120-page ‘Conclusion’ would be worth putting out independently.
3. Brandom tends to use Hegel’s German terms ‘Niederträchtigkeit’ (baseness or ignobility) and ‘Edelmütigkeit’ (nobility, magnanimity). It seems to me that Brandom equivocates on Niederträchtigkeit. Sometimes, being niederträchtig means operating solely on self-serving motives, without regard for ‘higher’ moral or sittlich motives, and attributing solely such motives to others. But sometimes he describes the niederträchtig person as someone who takes our actions to be caused, to arise out of mechanisms and/or drives that are not, in fact, in the ball park of the normative at all. I cannot investigate the significance of this equivocation here.
4. The quote is from James Hogg (1824), The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hogg himself must have had the Biblical Epistle to Titus 1:15 in mind: ‘To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled’ (English Standard Version).
5. For a quick overview of that history see the section on the history of the concept of race in James and Burgos (Citation2020).
6. Is re-orienting our understanding of race so that we no longer think of it as describing a feature of the world but only a feature of our ideologies the kind of ‘expressively progressive’ story Brandom has in mind? Aristotle was talking about the same thing we call a hand. Arguably, Calhoun or some other 19th-century slave owner is not talking about the same thing a contemporary race-theorist is. The reference of ‘race’ is not preserved across these uses.